My name is Lucinda Morrison, and I was sixty-six years old the October my world turned upside down in our quiet little town just outside Columbus, Ohio.
I honestly thought life had run out of ways to surprise me.
I was wrong.
My son Dean and his wife Nyla were heading off on a seven-day cruise out of Florida, leaving me to watch my eight-year-old grandson, Damian. He had been labeled non-verbal since birth, and for eight long years I’d never heard the sound of his voice.
That morning, my small front yard was littered with fallen maple leaves, the air cool and sharp the way it gets in the Midwest when summer finally gives up. Dean was loading their suitcases into the trunk of their shiny sedan, talking over his shoulder in that careful tone I’d come to recognize—love mixed with obligation, like caring for his own mother was something to check off his to-do list.
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